Tenacious, eager and skilled, Michelle Lang was a natural reporter

Renata D’Aliesio and Suzanne Wilton, Canwest News Service01.03.2010

Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang poses in a military vehicle in Afghanistan on Christmas Day. Lang was killed by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan Dec. 30, 2009, while covering the war for the Canwest News Service. Four Canadian soldiers also died in the blast.

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CALGARY — Michelle Lang phoned her fiance the morning of her first patrol with a Canadian reconstruction team in Afghanistan.

It was nighttime in Calgary. Lang, a Calgary Herald reporter on secondment to Canwest News Service, had been in Kandahar province for nearly three weeks on her first stint covering the war between NATO and the Taliban.

She and Michael Louie talked about how fast the time apart had passed. In a little more than three weeks, she’d be home.

“Prior to her leaving she asked me what I wanted to read, and I said I wanted to read about the good stuff that they’re doing over there,” Louie recalls.

“She died trying to get those types of stories.”

Lang, 34, is the first Canadian reporter killed in Afghanistan. Travelling in a light-armoured vehicle, she and four Canadian soldiers — three of them reservists — were killed Wednesday by a homemade bomb on what was considered a safe stretch of dirt road on the outskirts of Kandahar City.

For reporters, being asked to cover the war in Afghanistan is a testament to the calibre of their journalism, as it’s one of the most dangerous reporting assignments in the world.

Lang was one of the Canada’s best.

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It was one of those headlines that instantly grabs a reader, but the first line of the story was the hook that reeled in people.

“Vomit serves up virus at buffet,” read the front page of The Prince George Free Press, a bi-weekly newspaper in the northern B.C. city.

The story’s author was Michelle Lang, then 24 and barely a year into her first newspaper job.

Lang toiled over the article, interviewing a public official three times to make sure she had the facts right.

A regional environmental health officer told her 13 people had became ill with Norwalk virus after eating at a local restaurant where a customer had vomited on the buffet table.

In a meeting with her editor and the head of the paper, Lang fought for the story and to have the restaurant named.

Publisher Lorne Doerkson remembers weighing the potential legal risks of printing the story and being sued, but Lang’s passion persuaded him to do so.

As a result of publicity from the article, the restaurant closed. The paper was slapped with a $1-million-plus lawsuit, but eventually won a protracted court battle.

In the end, the case yielded a precedent-setting legal decision reinforcing the media’s obligation and right to bring important information to the public.

“To see someone like Michelle stand up and defend a story ... it’s pretty uplifting,” says Doerkson, a veteran newspaperman.

Journalism, for Lang, was a calling rather than a career choice.

“She was born to it,” says Shane Mills, who gave Lang her first break in the business in 1998.

The Vancouver resident was in her third year of studying English at Simon Fraser University when she was hired as a summer intern at the Prince George Free Press.

From an early age, Art and Sandra Lang instilled in their daughter a love of reading. Their home was filled with books, magazines and newspapers, says her aunt, Catherine Lang.

“Her parents also travelled extensively, so Michelle’s world view was expansive and deep from an early age,” she adds.

When her summer internship ended, Mills and others at the paper begged Lang to stay on full time. She did and was named outstanding junior reporter of 1999 for Cariboo Press, a B.C.-based community newspaper chain.

She also earned the attention of a daily paper, the Moose Jaw Times-Herald in Saskatchewan.

At first, Times-Herald managing editor Lesley Sheppard was skeptical Lang was as good as she professed. The young reporter wouldn’t stop calling Sheppard after applying for a job at the small daily paper.

She soon proved her worth after joining the 12-person newsroom in April 2000.

“You never had to tell her what to do. You never had to push her,” Sheppard says. “We knew from the beginning she wasn’t going to stay there long.”

Lang took on the police and courts beat. Sheppard says the police liked and trusted her so much, they’d phone her at home when crime news broke.

The Regina Leader-Post soon noticed Lang, hiring her seven months later to cover agriculture — Saskatchewan’s most important industry.

Lang was the first to admit she knew little about farming. She was a quick study, though.

Bruce Johnstone, business editor at the Leader-Post, says she embodied all the qualities that make a great journalist: dedication, tenacity and enthusiasm.

During her two years in Regina, she broke several important stories, including one chronicling how an agricultural company was illegally shipping and selling what it purported to be seed grain.

“It was a fairly major breach of the law and she broke the story and did a very good job of explaining a complicated situation,” Johnstone says.

“She took a beat which is not considered to be glamorous and ... made it a stepping stone for her to go on with bigger and better things.”

Bigger and better led in 2002 to an oil city on the cusp of a major economic boom.

Lang left a permanent position in Regina for a temporary job at the Calgary Herald in the business section. It didn’t take her long to secure a full-time job.

She eventually moved to the city section, tapped to fill the high-profile and challenging role of health reporting.

Lang rattled politicians and, when necessary, held their feet to the fire, giving a voice to ailing patients.

This past year, for instance, her reporting helped spur the province to extend prescription drug coverage to two expensive but necessary medicines, Avastin and Lucentis.

“You always went into an interview with Michelle knowing you had to be on top of your game, because she would catch you if you didn’t do your homework,” he says.

Lang ventured beyond public institutions to talk directly to patients. Many were ordinary citizens with extraordinary stories.

“It’s not an easy job when you’ve got grieving families and you have to deal with them,” says Calgarian Wendy Baseotto, who spoke to Lang after Baseotto’s teenage son, Jordan, died. The 18-year-old lost his life after waiting 12 hours at a local hospital for doctors to operate on his burst appendix.

Baseotto’s husband, Bruno, says Lang wanted to get to the truth and make a difference. “I could feel and sense her passion for her work.”

That passion earned Lang a prestigious National Newspaper Award in May, when she was recognized as the top beat reporter in the country.

Her award-winning articles included exposing a confidential government-commissioned audit that recommended the province turn several small rural hospitals into nursing homes or urgent care centres. It also features her investigation of Alberta’s contentious efforts to recruit South African doctors.

Overseas, she carefully travelled from Cape Town to Johannesburg and, despite the potential danger of visiting a crime-ridden area, wanted to see first-hand the impact of the AIDS epidemic on African children, recalls Herald senior editor Chris Varcoe.

In 2006, Lang also spent months documenting the life of a 38-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis who was forced to live in a nursing home for seniors, because there was nowhere else for the patient to go.

For five months, Lang followed patient Tanya Beaton, documenting every aspect of her experience at the facility.

Afghanistan was the most difficult and dangerous foreign assignment of Lang’s career.

Like the aspiring journalist who peppered a Prince George editor with questions during her internship job interview, she questioned countless people about how best to handle the dangers of reporting in the country.

She wanted to tell the best stories she could about Canada’s single-most important foreign policy issue of the past decade.

Lang arrived at the NATO military base at Kandahar Airfield on Dec. 11. Reporting for Canwest, the country’s largest newspaper chain, her editor Randy Newell says she immediately sought to get on the ground with Canadian troops, outside the protective walled and wired confines of the sprawling main base.

Within a day of arriving, she had secured her first trip “outside the wire” to spend several days with Canadian troops and a battalion of the Afghan National Army.

Chronicling a two-day, Afghan-led mission in a region southwest of Kandahar City, she wrote about how the Canadian Forces were helping Afghans bolster their military presence.

“She basically landed feet running,” says Newell.

On base, Canadian Press reporter Colin Perkel worked in the same media tent as Lang. He says she was a thoughtful, curious journalist, but by no means reckless.

When an opportunity arose to accompany a de-mining patrol, Lang decided not to go.

“She thought it would be too risky for whatever story might come out of it,” says Perkel, who’s still in Kandahar.

Newell says Lang wanted to write about hospital care during her stint, drawing on her experience as a medical reporter. She also hoped to find an Afghan family willing to reflect on how their lives have changed since the U.S. ousted the Taliban following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

“Unfortunately, it was something she never got to do,” he says.

During her 20 days in Kandahar, Lang interviewed everyone from soldiers to civilians, from senior military officials to federal politicians.

Neither the helicopter nor artillery rounds that went off at Masum Ghar seemed to shake Lang, Natynczyk says.

“She was calm,” he notes. “She was very inquisitive. If she had a point, she became very focused on it and the successive questions came.

“But she was always professional.”

In her last e-mail to Newell, Lang told him she was headed to Canada’s provincial reconstruction team, based in Kandahar City. Lang planned to spend about a week with the group, which focuses on development in the city and rural villages.

“Hopefully this will produce some interesting stories on the civilian/reconstruction side, as well as some military ones,” she wrote.

Spending time with the reconstruction team is an assignment many Canadian reporters in Afghanistan have done without injury or death.

“She was eager,” says her fiance, who spoke to her the morning she died. “She thought that she would get some pretty good stuff out of it. She was excited about going.”

Wearing a helmet and body armour, Lang was inside a light-armoured vehicle with several soldiers conducting a routine patrol on the outskirts of Kandahar City when they struck an improvised explosive device — the kind that has killed 83 of the 138 Canadian soldiers in the country.

Tenacious, eager and skilled, Michelle Lang was a natural reporter

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